Florence Halop

Short with huge glasses and a voice from a Brooklyn frog pond. That’s how everyone remembers Florence Halop, who had a short but memorable career on Night Court in the mid-‘80s.

That’s not how she looked about 30 years earlier, when she played the mother on Meet Millie. What you saw on screen back then wasn’t what she looked like, either. She put on 40 pounds of padding for the role, as she had barely turned 30 and looked more like the character she had been playing on Jimmy Durante’s radio show in the late ‘40s, Hot Breath Houlihan.

And she certainly didn’t look like she did when she appeared on a 15-minute show on WSGH in Brooklyn in 1929. That’s because she was six.

Halop’s role on Durante was so well-known, the characters in the book, movie and TV series “M*A*S*H” could play with it when referring to Major Margaret Houlihan.

She was busy on radio in the ‘40s, being a regular on several shows, including Passion DiMaggio on the Jack Paar show. Her best known role was that of Miss Duffy on Duffy’s Tavern. Halop amusingly recalled once how critic John Crosby referred to her as “the Grover Cleveland of Miss Duffys in that she is the only one with a split administration.” She took over the role after the first Miss Duffy, Shirley Booth, divorced her husband, Duffy creator Ed Gardner. She found Gardner a little too difficult to get along with and quit, only to return several years later after a revolving door of actresses in the part.

Here’s a story from one of the newspaper magazine supplements of December 12, 1943. Halop’s age is legitimate. Child and teenage stars were known to shave a few years off and keep them off through adulthood (Arnold Stang, Walter Tetley, Janet Waldo) to improve their employment chances. Well, for a while. Three years later, a New York Daily News story has only aged her by a year.

The New Help at Duff’s Tavern in Florence Halop
SHE'S a Dead End Kid sister—she played Mae West at the age of 12.
She's the new Miss Duffy of Duffy's Tavern: Florence Halop, pert, 20, red-haired, green-eyed, microphonic mimic and character actress.
Brother Billy Halop was a Dead End Kid of Broadway and Hollywood fame and his career moved the family from New York to California. Florence went to law school there but didn't let the wherefores and whereases interfere with getting before the camera with her brother and with Bonita Granville.
But before that, she had gotten herself off to a fine start in radio at the age of 5 by singing on "The Children's Hour" and falling off her platform in the middle of it, thereby furnishing her own sound effects.
At 12 on the March of Time program she did Mae West and skipped lightly from that to Shirley Temple all in the same night.
Before joining Duffy she was heard with Colonel Stoopnagle, and on the Kate Smith hour.
Out of hundreds of auditioners for the Miss Duffy part to replace Shirley Booth she won by an accent—Brooklyn, of course.
Florence says the funniest experience she's ever had in radio happened in Duffy's Tavern—and she'll probably say that again and again. Archie (Ed Gardner) was roughing up one of the guests—this time Orson Welles, who was tossing the words with Archie, but sitting down, for he had a broken ankle. Welles was monkeying around and Gardner suddenly ad-libbed—"for a guy with a broken ankle you certainly step on a lot of laughs."
Her biggest thrills, she says, came when working with Arturo Toscanini and the NBC Symphony orchestra, and when doing a dramatic sketch with Madame Schumann-Heink. Her hardest part was being a cold-blooded killer on "District Attorney" while she gave her audience chills, she was running a fever of 102 degrees.
With her background in radio Florence is really in good condition to take on the unpredictable Archie. If she studies hard on his latest outburst, his "Duffy's First Reader," she should be able to hang on the required number of rounds. If he says toe-may-toe, she knows he just means a dame, but if he raises his eyebrows and lowers his voice a half octave with toe-mah-toe, why that's a dame from Park Avenue, according to lessons in grammar from his Reader. Vice versa to Archie is a reversible vice (he has something there), semipro is a ball player paid half of the time, maggot is a person of rank—as "a big financial maggot." Yes, she'll have a good time!

Halop took a break from supporting roles on radio shows (The Falcon, Gangbusters) to visit Florida. We learn a bit more about her in this story in the St. Petersburg Times of May 19, 1946.

“HELLO, BIG BOY”
Blond Florence Halop, Star Of Screen. Radio Visits City
Florence Halop—vivacious blond actress-model of radio, stage and screen—has two kinds of "personalities:" The type Johnny Mercer sings about and the witty charm that makes for conversational laughter and popularity.
She brought both of them with her to St. Petersburg for a short vacation and at the moment she has most of the 14-year-olds at Admiral Farragut academy acting in their "Best Foot Forward" menner [sic]. She and her mother are visiting Joel, 12-year-old Farragut cadet and Florence's younger brother. Her big brother is Billy Halop, famous "Dead End Kid" of stage and screen.
RADIO is the main medium which has transported Miss Halop's talents all over the nation and the world. She is the second "Miss Duffy" of Archie's Tavern. She was Kay Kyser’s commedienne and originator of the “Oh, your father's moustache!” line. She made "Hello, Big Boy" a favorite salutation when she appeared on the Ballentine show as a "low down sexy dame. She had comedy spots on the Maizie show with Ann Sothern recently, and plays often on “Mr. D. A.” programs and on “Mr. and Mrs. North.”
"I was a sneaky murderess with a southern accent on the North show one night and Joel wouldn't write to me for two weeks!" Florence laughed.
She credits her success in radio to something called "the breaks," but a brief look at her career reveals the important presence of hard work and good sense.
FLORENCE began following Billy to radio shows at the age of four, and soon began reading parts herself. When she was 10 she became the voices of "characters," Shirley Temple and Mae West on the old "March of Time" cast under Orson Welles' leadership.
When Orson formed his famed Mercury theatre, Florence joined and played in plays from ancient Greek to modern ones. She became a great admirer of Welles, declares him "misunderstood." She says, "He acts like a ham and a conceited genius because it's good publicity, but he's really wonderful and very loyal to his old friends."
Florence was strictly dramatic (from Ophelia to Topsy) until she began farce comedy on Kate Smith's bond tour five years ago. After that her zany characterizations highlighted the Col. Stoopnagle show (remember "Veronica Puddle?") and she became man-crazy "Miss Duffy" when Shirley Booth left Archie's Tavern.
IT WAS ON ARCHIE'S show that Florence became friends with Bing Crosby, the only person ever to throw her "out of character." It seems that Crosby, famous for ad libbing, changed a "What did you say?" to something like "Dig me another load of that wack, Jack" and Florence doubled into convulsive laughter. Other favorite stars are Errol Flynn ("not what he's painted") and Peggy Knudsen, Warner Bros, actress.
Florence returns to New York soon to resume radio acting and fashion modeling for Columbia and Mutual. She hopes to find a higher niche on the legitimate stage and make her face as well known as her voice and her acting ability.

Betty Grable clashed with Halop on the set of the picture Spring Reunion (1956). Perhaps that’s why Halop took a couple of years off before appearing on The Untouchables in 1959. Occasional TV work followed—she got into the commercial business in the mid-‘70s by appearing as a character in Top Ramen Noodles ads—before a regular role on St. Elsewhere came along, followed by Night Court. She died after only 20-some-odd episodes.

Halop spent virtually her entire life in show business. It sounds like she enjoyed every minute of it. Listen below to an interview she did with broadcaster Chuck Schaden in 1976.